Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House
It’s not easy being a successful professional woman working for the NFL. And it gets a lot harder when you throw blackmail, and a suspicious death into the mix. That’s the plot of a new suspenseful novel by Connecticut resident Elizabeth Staple. And she knows football. Staple is a lawyer who worked in media relations for the New York Giants and the New England Patriots.
Her novel, The Snap, about a major NFL team, the fictional Syracuse Bobcats, and in particular its celebrity head coach, is really about how ambitious women fare in a testosterone world – and here’s the surprise: The Snap is NOT a feminist rant, even though its first-person narrator 37-year-old Poppy Benjamin, at the top of the communications game, belongs to a small group of high-powered women in sports who call themselves WAGS – Women Against Groping Sleazeballs. Well, “sleazeballs” is a euphemism for a scatological word we can’t say on air.
Nor does the title, “the snap” reference anything physical. The “snap” says Poppy, is that moment, as Poppy reflects, when “a person who has been pushed so long for so hard and held it together, and smiled and swallowed it down … simply cannot take it anymore.” It’s also when such a person realizes she is capable of a snap erroneous judgment --because women, like men, are seduced by power, jealousy, and competition.
The novel opens with a one-page obit on Bobcats head coach Red Guillory, the adored icon, the “top head coach in franchise history” – Super Bowls, conference finals, division titles. Rumors are –Poppy will try to tamp them down, that’s her job – that he was murdered. He was found by his wife with his bloodied head smashed in. Rumors also are that he played around. Don’t get excited. This is NOT a whodunit. It is, however, a why it happened – and how- questions that increasingly plague Poppy and get her to thinking about her own ambiguous behavior with Coach going back to when she first interned with the Bobcats 15 years earlier. She was thrilled of course, her dream job. Her father had been in football and they are close. She’s had boyfriends, one serious, but never “the” one. That designation belongs only to her beloved job. Being in The WAGS helps: “We’d all progressed into the upper levels of our fields, and we all needed a safe place to vent . . . .”
Coach’s death will change Poppy’s perspective, especially since the day after his body is found, each of the five WAGS receives a similar anonymous note: “I know what you did. Tell the truth or pay the consequences. You have five days.”
The narrative moves back and forth from NOW to 15 years earlier when Poppy was a 22-year-old newbie. She did her job well – and she still does, mentoring new interns - but she begins to sense with Coach’s death that something is amiss, and she admits to herself that she may well have been an unwitting enabler or at least someone who let a sexual bully pass because it was company policy.
The Snap is full of football lore and lingo – perhaps a bit too much – but it’s obvious that Staple had a ball writing it [pun intended]. Its theme of dealing with accusations of misconduct and apparent lack of remorse or retribution, especially in areas where power and sexism rule, gives the book a wide and timely significance. The revelation of who killed Coach and sent the threatening letters is surprising, and a subtle reminder not to jump to conclusions.
